The Book of Dreams and Ghosts eBook

“I think,” said I, “that you did
no harm in telling Bolter’s young woman.”

“I never thought of it when I told her, or of
her interest in the kennel; but, by George, she soon
broke off her engagement.”

“Did you know Manning, the Pakeha Maori, the
fellow who wrote Old New Zealand?”

“No, what about him?”

“He did not put it in his book, but he told
the same yarn, without the dogs, as having happened
to himself. He saw the whole arm, and the
hand was leprous.”

“Ugh!” said the Beach-comber.

“Next morning he was obliged to view the body
of an old Maori, who had been murdered in his garden
the night before. That old man’s hand was
the hand he saw. I know a room in an old house
in England where plucking off the bed-clothes goes
on, every now and then, and has gone on as long as
the present occupants have been there. But I
only heard lately, and they only heard from
me, that the same thing used to occur, in the same
room and no other, in the last generation, when another
family lived there.”

“Anybody see anything?”

“No, only footsteps are heard creeping up, before
the twitches come off.”

“And what do the people do?”

“Nothing! We set a camera once to photograph
the spook. He did not sit.”

“It’s rum!” said the Beach-comber.
“But mind you, as to spooks, I don’t
believe a word of it.” {299}

THE GHOST THAT BIT

The idiot Scotch laird in the story would not let
the dentist put his fingers into his mouth, “for
I’m feared ye’ll bite me”.
The following anecdote proves that a ghost may entertain
a better founded alarm on this score. A correspondent
of Notes and Queries (3rd Sept., 1864) is responsible
for the narrative, given “almost verbatim from
the lips of the lady herself,” a person of tried
veracity.

“Emma S—–­, one of seven children,
was sleeping alone, with her face towards the west,
at a large house near C—–­, in the
Staffordshire moorlands. As she had given orders
to her maid to call her at an early hour, she was
not surprised at being awakened between three and
four on a fine August morning in 1840 by a sharp tapping
at her door, when in spite of a “thank you,
I hear,” to the first and second raps, with
the third came a rush of wind, which caused the curtains
to be drawn up in the centre of the bed. She
became annoyed, and sitting up called out, “Marie,
what are you about?”

Instead, however, of her servant, she was astonished
to see the face of an aunt by marriage peering above
and between the curtains, and at the same moment—­whether
unconsciously she threw forward her arms, or whether
they were drawn forward, as it were, in a vortex of
air, she cannot be sure—­one of her thumbs
was sensibly pressed between the teeth of the apparition,
though no mark afterwards remained on it. All
this notwithstanding, she remained collected and unalarmed;